


Dice for Decimals

by Gileonnen



Category: The Wire
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Profanity, Canon-Typical Racism, Canon-Typical Sexism, Detectives and String, Economics 101, M/M, Multi, Significant Dry-Erase Boards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:03:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Russell Bell is a week unshaven, with gold-rimmed glasses and leather-reinforced elbows on his court coat. He's professorial in a broad-shouldered Indiana Jones kind of way; if it weren't for the metal detectors at the entrance to the courthouse, McNulty would swear blind he was packing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dice for Decimals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redletters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redletters/gifts).



> The most compelling moment of McNulty's monomaniacal pursuit of Stringer, for me, is the moment where he sees Stringer's library and asks, "This is Stringer? Who the fuck was I chasing?" The Stringer in this AU is no less occluded; it's only that different parts of him see the light. Thanks to Megkips and likeadeuce for the beta!

The expert witness is a week unshaven, with gold-rimmed glasses and leather-reinforced elbows on his court coat. He's professorial in a broad-shouldered Indiana Jones kind of way; if it weren't for the metal detectors at the entrance to the courthouse, McNulty would swear blind he was packing. "Who the fuck is this clown?" he whispers to Kima, who just rolls her eyes and shuffles over.

"Dr. Russell Bell. Economics professor at BCCC. Guess the defense figured he could blow a few holes in our timeline."

"Motherfucking market forces."

Kima lowers her voice even further, hand up between the prof and her lips. "Yep. Freamon thinks he had some ties to the Barksdale organization back when they was coming up, but it's all old stuff. Nothing he's ready to give a jury."

None of them has anything Freamon's ready to give a jury — but the commissioner wanted drugs on the table, and there's no photo op in letting Freamon chase that thread right up Rawls's ass.

No good dwelling on it, except McNulty isn't good at much of anything except dwelling on things. "Does he have a record?"

"Shoplifting. Stole a badminton set once from a toy store."

McNulty snorts and stretches his arms over the back of the bench, legs spread to claim the space to left and right. He glances between Barksdale at the defendant's table and Bell as he approaches the stand, but the two of them don't even lock eyes. Instead, Bell gazes out over the courtroom like he's ready to school them, hands resting lightly on the polished wood of the stand as though it's a lectern. He commands the room; he makes Judge Phelan look like an afterthought.

McNulty nudges Kima's knee with his own. "Would you do him?"

"What the fuck kind of question is that?"

"C'mon. I'm straight, and I'd do him."

"The fuck you would."

"What, you don't wanna feel that steel-wool chin of his on your pu —"

"Some of us are trying to watch a trial here," says Freamon, smooth and unruffled. "So how about you save your fantasies for the truck stop and let me watch this son of a bitch get convicted."

The bailiff finishes swearing Dr. Bell in, and the defense approaches the bench.

Bell never once looks at Barksdale. _That's strange,_ McNulty thinks, leaning in and folding his hands together on the back of Lester's bench. _Most witnesses can't keep their eyes off the defendant, but Barksdale doesn't even get a first look, let alone a second? You don't look at a man because you don't need to know what he looks like. Because you already know._

He doesn't have to listen to Bell's testimony. He already knows what he's going to say.

*

"Now, I know most of you have jobs and families, and I'm sympathetic to their demands on your time. I am. But if you think my sympathy is gonna get y'all through when you don't do the reading, or when you show up consistently late to class, or when you don't show up at all — well, y'all better not bank on it. You only need a D to pass this class, but you need a C to move on to Econ 201. That's a full C; not a D+, not a C-, a full C." Bell rakes the room with his eyes, then gestures one-handed toward the exit. "If you don't think you're up to that, the door's over there."

No one moves. _Of course no one's gonna move,_ McNulty thinks, drumming his pencil on the front of _Introductory Economics, 6th Edition_ and slouching in his seat. _They'll just sit through to the end of class and then withdraw when there aren't twenty-odd people watching them pussy out._

Bell smiles, relaxing back against the desk at the front of the room. His whole manner changes; even a few rows back from the front, McNulty feels like Bell's talking to him personally. "My name is Dr. Bell, and I got my degree in economics from UMD. My specialty's microeconomics, but if y'all have questions about macro, I'll steer you straight. Now, we're gonna be doing some group work in this class —"

He pauses, like he's expecting the groan. It's mostly the kids just out of high school who sound pissed off, McNulty notices; the non-traditional students (like him) are old enough to know that the working world's all project teams and special details and, who even fucking knows, board meetings or some shit like that.

"I hear you," says Bell. "But can't everybody be a lone gun CEO. A business is made up of people working together, _organized_ , communicating all up and down the chain of command. So we're gonna go around the room and introduce ourselves, so we know what our team members look like."

Maybe it's McNulty's imagination, but he thinks Bell looks him right in the eye when he says it.

He zones out for the first row's introductions. LaShonda, divorced mother of three, works in a call center polling people about office supplies. Tomás, unemployed, first-generation college student, wants to open a bike cafe. Christie, last grown kid just left the nest, having trouble finding a job with twenty-year-old credentials.

 _Tap, tap, tap_ goes his pencil on the book.

Antoine, doesn't know what he wants to do but knows he needs a degree to do it. Darnell, wants to move up to sales from accounting. A half-dozen other people in shitty white-collar service jobs, all wanting to move up to a slightly less shitty service job.

"Jimmy McNulty," says McNulty, when his turn comes. "Police — needed something to do that wasn't driving a patrol boat around the bay."

"And why'd you pick economics?" Bell prompts.

"Heard the teacher was hot." A ripple of laughter goes through the classroom. "But I guess they meant the other one."

Bell pauses only a moment to give McNulty an unimpressed look over his glasses. "Already showed you where the door is," he says, and then moves on to the next desk.

Monique, sixteen, looking for a more challenging curriculum than her high school has to offer. Wyatt, "like Earp," fifty-eight, trying hard to get sober and needing somewhere to be on Thursday nights.

Jamilla, just turned eighteen, who wants an MBA and a corner office. "It's a place to start, right?" she says, laughing like she's not sure she's supposed to be here.

Bell grins. His teeth are white as a shark's. "Got to start somewhere."

*

The patrol boat chugs past the same sign three times a day: _Coming Soon: RESIDENTIAL/RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES from B &B ENTERPRISES._

"They want to tear down the grain pier for _this_ shit," mutters Diggins, the first time they pass. "Free enterprise, my ass."

By the second time, McNulty's remembered where he's heard of B&B before.

By the third time, someone's spray-painted FAGS in the corner of the sign.

*

On a quiet weekend, McNulty takes I-95 south to the University of Maryland, following the signs to visitor parking. "Hey, where's the library?" he asks a couple of kids smoking near the campus bookstore, but they just shrug and lean over to study a photo on a cell phone. McNulty catches a flash of tit on the screen before he turns away — but at least he catches it.

He fetches up eventually under the columns of McKeldin Library, with the biggest fucking turtle statue he's ever seen beside him and a long fountain stretching down the slight hill before him like an endless, wet stair.

This place fills him with contempt, with its Monticello pretensions and its knockoff National Mall, but then he's never really dreamed about a college career. Doesn't even really understand the idea; like the others in Econ 101, he thinks of a degree as a stepping stone to a _real_ career. He tries to imagine not-yet-Dr. Bell standing here, a kid from the Baltimore projects with a shoplifting charge on his juvenile record and a community college degree shoring up his MBA.

Bell had probably looked down the mall, hiked his bag up on his shoulder, and thought, _Fuck stealing badminton sets. I'm gonna steal the ivory tower._

McNulty turns away from the fountain and slinks into the library, flashing the woman at the circulation desk his badge. "Officer McNulty. I'm looking for a dissertation from 1998," he says. "Russell Bell, economics. You still hold onto those?"

"I'm pretty sure we do," the woman says, and she looks up the call number on her computer. "Now, you won't be able to take it out of the library, but we do have a photocopier. It's a little pricey — I think ten cents a copy? — but, uh, the circulating librarian will probably make an exception for a policeman ..."

"Aren't you the librarian?"

The woman laughs and copies down the call number. "I'm just a work-study student. The circ librarian is on her lunch break."

Armed with a slip of paper thinner than his smallest finger, McNulty heads into the stifling stacks.

*

"' _The Microeconomics of the Unregulated Heroin Trade: A Case Study of Three Criminal Organizations in Urban Philadelphia_. Completed under the auspices of the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland by Dr. Russell Bell. 1998,'" reads Lester, before he returns his attention to the tiny scrolled bedpost he's carving.

Over at the board, Kima snatches the binder out of McNulty's hand and reads the title page for herself. "Motherfucker _is_ an expert," she says, as much wondering as annoyed.

Lester grins without looking up. "Did you think he wasn't? Levy ain't the type to pull a community college professor onto the stand unless he's reeeal sure he's going to be convincing. You should read his book."

At this point Herc tramps in, paper tray of coffee in one hand and titty mag in the other. "Wait, Sobotka has a book?"

Kima's perfected her _bitch, please_ look, and she gives him one in exchange for her coffee. " _Bell_ has a book. Sobotka ain't got shit."

Herc puts down the tray and takes a long slug of coffee, then coughs and sucks in a cooling breath through his nose at the heat of it. "I can't keep up with who the fuck we're chasing."

"Just following the thread," says Lester serenely. "Wherever it leads, we follow that thread."

There are black threads connecting Nick Sobotka and White Mike, White Mike and Proposition Joe; there are nests of red strings tying Prop Joe and Frank Sobotka to an empty card, on which Lester has written _Barksdale??_ in his painfully tidy handwriting.

Follow the string, and who knows where the hell you wind up.

McNulty lets Kima keep the photocopy; he's already read it through three times while the boat circles the bay. "Well, it's been great," he says, "but I have to go learn to tie a knot. Gentlemen —" he tugs the front of his knit cap at Kima "— ladies —"

"You tip your hat at me, I ain't gonna be responsible for my actions," says Herc, and McNulty laughs himself all the way to the street.

*

Halfway through the semester, and there are only fifteen people left in the Thursday night class. Antoine was gone after the first week; Wyatt, two weeks after that. The rest vanished one or two at a time — they'd be gone one week, and gone the next, and whether they got behind or gave up on the class, the bottom line is they aren't coming back.

"Good job, Katya," says Dr. Bell in an undertone, laying a graded midterm facedown on the quiet Ukrainian girl's desk. "Good job, Monique."

He gets to McNulty's desk near the back, and in that same undertone, he says, "Picking up steam there, Jim."

McNulty flips the sheaf of papers over and sees the circled B at the top of the test in green felt-tip pen. ( _They train college teachers to grade in green or purple instead of red,_ Prez told him once, when they were studying for McNulty's first quiz together. _It's supposed to be soothing._ )

He _is_ picking up steam, and for just a second, he feels a pride that has nothing to do with getting Bell good. It's one thing to decide that college isn't for you, that there's no place for it in the life you're building for yourself; it's a totally different thing to turn away because you're afraid you're never going to be good enough. For the space of that second, he really feels like he might be good enough.

From the middle of the room, Dr. Bell says, "Today we're gonna be covering elasticity of demand. Now, can anyone give me a _definition_ of inelastic demand?"

Monique raises her hand, but Dr. Bell doesn't call on her; if he does, he knows that he'll be calling on her all night.

Eventually, McNulty raises his hand, and Dr. Bell raises his eyebrows to match. "Jim. What you got?"

"Change in price doesn't really change demand."

"Good. That's a good start. Gold star. Now, can anyone give me an _example_ of inelastic demand?" He turns away from McNulty, scanning the room for new volunteers. "LaShonda."

"Asthma medicine," she says promptly. "You know you've got to have that asthma medicine, no matter how they jack up the price."

"That's a _good_ example. That's a real good example." He returns to the board, a dry-erase board that makes McNulty irrationally homesick for homicide, and begins to scrawl a list of terms in red ink. "So what we've got here is a medical necessity, and LaShonda's exactly right. _Necessity_ is one of the determinants of elasticity."

He underlines _necessity_. "But now, if you got insurance, they're gonna cover some kinds of medicine but not others. Any of you notice that?"

No one speaks up. McNulty wonders if any of them _do_ have insurance. LaShonda and Tomás exchange an uncertain look, like they're expecting a pop quiz.

"So when you go into a convenience store," continues Dr. Bell, as though reading the silence, "there's the brand-name headache medicine and there's the generic aspirin. And if you have a headache, you're still gonna buy the medicine, but ain't nobody gonna buy the brand-name medicine when the generic stuff is five dollars cheaper."

"That's right," LaShonda agrees. The worried lines on the sides of her mouth vanish.

"So another determinant is _availability of equivalent products_ —"

"Excuse me, Professor," says McNulty, raising his hand high. "I was reading your book, and I had a question about why you say street drugs are an elastic demand."

Dr. Bell only moves to the next line and writes out _manipulable desire._ "This is getting a little into the psychology of economics, or even the neurology," he says. "But with an addictive desire cycle, you got a baseline desire, and you can model that like a medical necessity. The dope fiend's gotta have his dope, no matter how you jack up the price. But you cut the price down, the dope fiend's just gonna buy more dope, and pretty soon he's gonna need more to get the same high. Then you jack up the price again, and the baseline has shifted. The necessity has shifted. Y'all think about that next time you get half-price drinks at happy hour."

He pauses to let everyone copy down what they like, and then he flashes a smile at McNulty. "You ain't gonna get an A by reading my book, but I admire the ass-kissing. You keep that up."

*

"Hey," says McNulty, sliding into the empty desk beside Katya at 9:50 p.m. and putting a hand on _Introductory Economics._ She nearly jumps out of her skin; he can see her pupils contract, and immediately he pulls his hands back.

"Hey, it's okay, calm down. I just ... you speak Ukrainian, right?"

She doesn't say anything. She nods, fractionally, but that's all.

"You heard about the dead girls in the shipping can? On the news?"

Another tiny nod. She has blonde eyebrows and blonde eyelashes; her black eyeliner makes her look like an ink drawing.

"I have some letters to their families," he says, trying to soften his voice the way Dr. Bell softens it for her, "and if you have time to come in to the station sometime this week ... we could use a translator. Just to make sure they go to the right places."

"I'll try," she says. She gathers up her books and tries to smile, but her eyes are still telegraphing terror.

At first, he thinks that she might be tied somehow to the illegals, but he's seen that look on too many women to believe it. It's a look that sees him at one beer too many, and for all he knows, that look is the only one that sees him clearly.

*

The bottle describes a perfect arc over the train tracks; McNulty scrubs a hand down his face and lets himself fall back against the car. "I checked into his records," he says, without preamble.

It's a testament to how many times they've had the same goddamn conversation that Bunk just takes a pull on his beer and says, "Again." No surprise in it.

"Not _his_. His, but not — fuck, I mean B &B Enterprises."

"Bell and Barksdale."

"Yeah, but fuck if Barksdale's name is anywhere near it. I've been over every goddamn zoning petition, every single fucking property tax return, and it's all LLCs and LTDs and other crap."

"Thought you said they came up together."

"Motherfuck." The beer is gone; all that's left is the Jameson's. " _We_ know they came up together. If Valchek would give Daniels a fucking wiretap, I bet we could tie the funeral parlor to Barksdale, but Daniels isn't even _working_ the Barksdale crew anymore."

"You got the drugs on the table and left the bodies in the ground, and ain't nobody wants to dig 'em up again," Bunk intones. "I thought you were working those Jane Does down at the docks."

The whiskey burns all the way down, but the second mouthful goes down smoother. "Fuck me. Fuck me right up the ass."

There's nothing to say to that, so they just stand staring across the tracks and listening to the wash of liquor against the sides of the bottle. Somewhere across town, a siren sounds.

"I'm gonna ask him out for a drink," decides McNulty.

A snort. "You've had stupider ideas," Bunk says, "but right now I can't think of any."

*

It turns out all Daniels has to say is, "We have reason to believe Sobotka's tied to the heroin market in Baltimore." No need to tie it to the Barksdale organization, and hardly any need to prove probable cause; Valchek says he'll walk it past the judge, and he doesn't look too closely at the numbers on their list.

They get their wiretap a few days later.

*

The audio cuts out. "Play it again," says Kima.

"We've already played it four fucking times," says Herc, but he's still leaning in with his shoulders crunched up around his ears, mouth slightly open.

Prez presses _play_ again.

" _Russ._ "

" _Bri, how many times I gotta tell you, you ignorant-ass bitch_ —"

" _He's dead, Russ. My baby boy is dead. This is on your watch._ "

Silence for three seconds.

" _I'll be there._ "

The audio cuts out. The five of them breathe.

"Brianna Barksdale," says Prez, because someone has to state the obvious. "Russell Bell. Holy shit, guys, it's Dr. Bell. The strings lead to _him_."

"Sure, he's the fucking stringer," scoffs Herc, but Lester writes on that empty card, _Russell Bell._

McNulty reaches into the top drawer of his desk, but someone's taken out the whiskey.

That someone must've been him, because it's waiting for him in the glove compartment after he clocks out.

*

McNulty's the last to hand in his final exam; he puts the Scantron sheet on top of the stack and straightens the pile. "You seemed off your game today," he comments, looking Dr. Bell up and down. "Need someone to buy you a drink?"

"Kiss this ass all you like, I still ain't curving the grade."

McNulty has read Bell's dissertation four times, replayed the day of the Barksdale trial in his head until Bell's voice has bored its way into his dreams. _I'm still not,_ the man in the courtroom would've said. _I'm still not curving the grade, my dear sir, but you may press your blushing lips to my well-muscled posterior as often as you like._

"I was thinking of kissing somewhere else."

Bell has maybe two inches and a good thirty pounds of solid muscle on him; he carries himself like a boxer, always ready to brace and deliver a blow. It's easy to forget that, in a cage of a classroom chair with Bell writing vocabulary terms on the board in fading dry-erase — and for only a second, McNulty has a crystal-clear image of how it will feel when Bell socks him in the jaw.

It's not exactly a bad image.

Bell only smiles that shark-toothed grin, though, and says, "Were you, now."

"We can keep flirting all night, but I guarantee, we'll both have a better time if we skip that part."

"Want to feel this steel-wool chin against your ass, huh?"

If he breaks stride for even a second, the last few months will have been for nothing. "Told you the first day, I heard the teacher was hot."

"I don't have any dirt on Barksdale."

"Who's talking about Barksdale?" He comes a step too close; Bell doesn't step back, though, not even when McNulty's close enough to taste his breath. "If you think I'm wearing a wire, you're welcome to strip-search me. Hell, you can do a cavity search if you like."

"So what's this?"

"This? Is a bad idea. They're my specialty — that's why they put me on the boat."

When Bell leans in for a kiss lined with teeth, though, when his broad palm comes up to seize McNulty by the scruff of the neck, it feels like a pretty damn good idea all around.

*

"This isn't actionable evidence," says Ronnie, while Lester and Kima are leaning over the table like they want to come around and make this personal. "I know what it sounds like, and I know how badly you want a case, but all this actually proves is, one, that Brianna Barksdale expected Russell Bell to mentor her son in some capacity before his death; two, that she blamed him for her loss; and three, that he was ready to express sympathy without admitting any kind of culpability. I'm sorry, but I don't think this will hold up in court."

"The _fuck_ it isn't actionable," snaps Kima, pushing back from the table with an expression of disgust. "They call that fucking number all the damn time —"

"And he never picks up. If you can demonstrate some kind of code in the _way_ that they call him, we might be able to start building a case, but with what you've given me ..."

"It's all right," says Daniels, while Kima swears at the corkboard. "We'll find something more substantive before we bring charges against him." That tone of voice says, _Or my detail will be very sorry for wasting your time._

"Do you even have a working theory about his relationship to the Barksdale organization?" Ronnie continues. "We have no evidence that he's receiving their money, no evidence that he's calling hits or handling drugs ... you do know how this will play in front of a jury, right? A well-educated, well-spoken black man got above his place, and the establishment smacked him back down."

"McNulty has a theory," says Lester, because apparently it's his turn to be the goddamn sacrificial lamb.

And when he goes to deny it, he finds that he _does_ have a theory after all. "Market manipulation," he says. "Barksdale was a soldier. He stirs the pot with a few hits and creates a climate of perceived scarcity, and then people are willing to pay more for less because at least they're _getting_ dope. They're satisfying their baseline needs at higher prices, then binging during the quiet periods and building up a tolerance. It's not even about turf wars, it's about ... fucking dope fiend psychology."

Ronnie smiles with only one corner of her mouth. "Interesting. Where'd you get that bullshit theory?"

"Straight from the bull's ass."

"It doesn't matter if it's true; it matters if it's how Bell _thinks_ these things work," Lester agrees. "If Barksdale isn't out on the streets, manipulating the market with a Glock, we'll probably find evidence of other market manipulation."

"Which means bringing in a CI." Kima takes a deep breath and holds it. "I'll see if Bubs has anything to share with the class."

*

The next day, Frank Sobotka's body washes ashore. The day after that, Valchek disbands the detail.

The day after _that_ , McNulty's back on the boat.

"I want you to know, I fought for you," Daniels says, when they meet again at Sobotka's funeral. Daniels looks like an undertaker in his black suit, with his hollow cheeks and his hungry eyes.

"I know you did," McNulty tells him, although he didn't know, really.

The union men glare at them like they don't belong, but Daniels doesn't so much as blink. "Homicide hasn't given up on those girls in the can. I want you to know that, too."

"But _you_ have."

Daniel's voice is brittle, all ice and thin steel. "So did you, when you decided to start trailing Bell around BCCC."

McNulty doesn't deny it, and since he doesn't deny it, there's no more to be said.

*

"Welcome back, Jim," says Dr. Bell, when McNulty slides into his seat at three minutes to seven; "Hey, Jim," Monique echoes, and LaShonda curls her lip and says, "You better not put him in my group again this year, Dr. Bell. He does _not_ attend group meetings." The rest of the group laughs, mostly because they know it's true.

McNulty takes out _Introductory Economics, 6th Edition, Volume II_ and lays it flat on his desk, opening his notebook on top of it. _28 Aug. Bell Observation_ , he writes at the top of the first page. "That's all right, Professor," he says, when the laughter's died down. "I've always worked better alone."


End file.
